


Look At Me and Tell Me I'm No Broken Thing

by drygin



Series: Birchcaster [2]
Category: Harlots (TV)
Genre: F/F, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Past Abuse, Past Rape/Non-con, The Local London Lesbian struggles with her past, The Not-Local Sailor Lesbian struggles with her feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-24
Updated: 2020-08-24
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:28:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26074936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drygin/pseuds/drygin
Summary: “Oh, this one was a wildling,” the gentleman gloats. “She was my first girl at Quigley's when I visited in my youth. She used to bite and kick, but the mouth on her...now, that was pleasing in far more ways than one, and made all of the effort worthwhile.”You can strike him, Nancy tells herself. She’s filled with the urge to run but can’t, her arms immovable dead weight at her sides and her legs locked in place. There’s nobody to scold her if she lashes out at him. Quigley can’t drag her by the wrist upstairs and lock her in a bedroom to sit alone in the dark, not from behind her jail bars.She can hit him. She's stronger than she was before.  But it’s Bonny’s fist that crashes into his face, throwing the man off-balance.
Relationships: Nancy Birch/Bonny Lancaster, Nancy Birch/Original Female Character(s)
Series: Birchcaster [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1805314
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	Look At Me and Tell Me I'm No Broken Thing

**Author's Note:**

> Side-note: This fic takes place after the events of "Settling Into Your Arms", roughly ten years before season one of the show.
> 
> Enjoy!

“You’re distracted today.”

Bonny looks up, her Captain’s stern downturned mouth visible beneath the felt brim of her tricorne hat. She lifts her head to meet his storm-grey eyes, one of his hands splayed on the maps unrolled across the table between them.

“I’m sorry, sir?” she asks.

Marius’s discontented sigh flutters the charts nearest to him. The expanse of space that is the ocean surrounding the British Isles on the map is littered with scrawls of their handwriting, marking out notable landmarks, trade routes, and islands.

Their respective notes cram against both sides of the country, crowding it like an imposing tidal wave. So far, their debate has lasted the lifespan of eight candles — Marius insisting on a route dependent on sighting different landmarks while she argues that lunar distances would be a much more reliable method of plotting their ship’s course on Marius’s proposed voyage across the sea to the Americas.

“This trade route, here.” Marius jabs a spot in the sea beneath the coast of North America with his thumb. “Reports tell us there’ve been repeated skirmishes in this channel between Spanish merchant vessels and British ships. If they continue to kick up a fuss, we could have a war on our hands, which is why we’re to make haste to the Americas and provide enforcement where it’s needed, under orders of the Crown.”

“Again, sir, there’s no safer way to make such a long journey than with the method I’ve suggested,” Bonny presses.

She has tried explaining to Nancy how the stars can be used to pinpoint a ship’s position on the sea, but the other woman hadn’t believed her. Instead, Nancy had thought Bonny was pulling her leg and dismissed her talk of stars and mathematics as pure nonsense. After Nancy had taken offence to her ramblings, Bonny gave up trying to explain.

In her anger, she had spent the evening at the end of a brunette’s mouth, a pretty thing from the tavern who flitted about from man to man before settling at Bonny’s table, taking up her offer on a game of cards. They tumbled into bed together after an hour or so of drinking and suffice conversation to ensure mutual comfort during their naked endeavour.

Only five days remain until she and Marius pack up their belongings to travel back to Eddings and make preparations for their voyage. That is, if they ever settle on a course to take. With each passing hour, there are less and less reasons Bonny can fabricate to avoid telling Nancy of her impending departure, and she’s running out of tavern women to fuck as a distraction.

“Once we return to Eddings, we’ll set off as soon as the seas are calm and the ship able,” Marius tells her. “Of course, we’ll have to make monthly trips back to port for supplies. The provisions we have now won’t last us longer than a month or so drifting across the Atlantic Ocean.”

“Will we return to London?” Bonny asks.

“Why London? There are plenty of other ideal ports. Eddings is quiet and nearer to the coast. We’d be wasting too much time travelling back here so frequently.”

The hopefulness in Bonny’s eyes perishes. She doesn’t know why she’s afraid of telling Nancy that she’s leaving soon. Odds are, the other woman will be glad to hear it after having to drag her around on so many errands.

She feels something of a friendship has formed between them, Nancy thawing to her presence well enough over the last few weeks. When they walk together now, Nancy strikes abreast with her rather than skulking behind, and chips in on Bonny’s previously one-sided conversations. Their most recent exchange, however, had been less pleasant than the others.

A few days past, while they were sitting together to rest after a morning spent hurrying through London on visits to several shops, Nancy had reached behind Bonny’s back to muss her hair, asking, “How long was it before you cut it?”

Bonny had laughed and given some off-handed answer, extending her hand to tousle Nancy’s hair only to learn of her aversion to other people’s touch the hard way with a stinging smack of birch across her knuckles.

Before she even registered the blow, Nancy had caught a hold of her wrist, the humour gone from the air with her waspish snap of, “That wasn’t an invitation, Lancaster.”

“This woman you’ve been seeing…” Marius begins, wrenching Bonny back into the present. It’s always _“this”_ or _“that woman”_ whenever he refers to Nancy. He never addresses her directly by name, as if he fears she’ll materialise from thin air if he dares to speak it.

“Can I trouble you for some specificity, sir?” Bonny asks.

“No, you may not,” he answers her curtly. “You know the one I mean.” He thumbs the glass face of the compass in his hand, letting out a brusque sigh as he pockets it. “I’ve heard a number of unsavoury things regarding what she does to a make a living in this city.”

Bonny, too, had heard. Or rather, Nancy had told her what she used her birch for. Bonny had doubled over in the street, laughing so hard her stomach ached, and most likely would have died of laughter if Nancy hadn’t snatched the tricorne hat off her head and smacked her with it, ending her red-faced gasping fit.

“People do what they must to survive,” Bonny replies indifferently.

 _“Bonny,”_ Marius warns her. “As a member of this crew, there is a certain —”

“How many times have you caught your men sneaking women on the ship to fuck —”

“— _reputation_ I expect you to uphold!” Marius finishes, nearly shouting to be heard over her. “Do you remember the outcry I received when I put forward the mere suggestion that because of your experience sailing on a merchant ship and tutorship under me, you be granted the rank of Quartermaster on my crew?”

Bonny does remember. She hunches her shoulders at the unpleasant memory, shrinking backwards. “Yes, sir.”

“I have no quarrels with whom you choose to bed at night, but by day, you are my right-hand,” Marius continues. “What is said about you could lead trouble back to me from my superiors, and you haven’t exactly been discreet by gallivanting around with that woman. It’s unflattering and it draws too much attention. End it, Bonny.”

After holding her stare for a moment to let his final words on the matter sink in, Marius begins rolling up the maps and charts over the table to put back into their leather cases. He sweeps several letters off the table, holding them out to her. “I need these sealed to send to parliament. Would you?”

Bonny nods, taking the letters from him. Glancing over their contents, she notices the handwriting on the pages is strangely unlike Marius’s usual hand. Instead, it’s much more refined and tidy, a blatant contrast to his smeared notes on the maps over the table. Comparing the two sets, it is almost as though two different men have taken ink to paper.

 _Strange_ , Bonny thinks, but she puts the difference down to exhaustion and slides the letters into envelopes. She melts a stick of wax over the flame of a candle on the table, watching it dribble into a satisfactory round blob. Pressing Marius’s seal to the lip of each envelope, she offers the letters back to him.

“I didn’t know your last name was French,” she remarks, intrigued by the name she had seen signed at the end of the letters in neat flourishes and strokes.

“It’s a surname I took from my mother after she remarried,” Marius explains in a dry tone that hardly suggests any fond sort of childhood reminiscence, taking the sealed envelopes from her. “I wasn’t fond of it when I was young, so I hardly use it now.”

Bonny nods in understanding, all too familiar with the distaste some childhood memories can hold, and already yearning for sleep and the warm bed in the other room. “Ah. Well, it’s pretty to look at.”

**~~O~~ **

Nancy paces through the alleyway separating her corner of Russell Street from the busier main road, glaring at the few people who amble past her in the same direction. Most of them keep their gazes downcast to avoid her eyes and any conversation, but through the cracked pane of a window, she spots a curious set of eyes peering out at her.

A small girl, dressed in pious black and white with curls of blonde hair let down to her shoulders, gawks at Nancy’s deathly way of dress from inside a small hovel crammed into the side street close by. Nancy holds the child’s stare, glowering sourly at her until she takes a shy step back.

An older woman, presumably the child’s mother, appears behind her in the window. Dressed in the same strange manner as the child, she whisks the girl away from the window by the wrist, the foreboding stare she gives Nancy through glassy eyes causing a shiver to run up her spine. The scowling woman pulls the curtains shut, and Nancy goes on her way.

She finds Bonny at a crossroads in the middle of the city square, staring down at a slip of paper in her hand and looking around with an uncertain expression while she wonders which path to take. Swallowing thickly, Nancy tugs at the scarf around her neck, frustrated by the bout of nervousness that has unexpectedly overcome her.

 _Get a bloody grip,_ she scolds herself, squaring her shoulders to draw up her height as much as possible before approaching Bonny in the street.

“Have you lost your way again, sailor?” she calls out gruffly, causing the navy woman’s head to whip around.

“Ah, my saviour!” Bonny exclaims in relief. She begins walking towards her, and for a moment that Nancy nearly misses, Bonny’s eyes dart around to glance warily at the faces of several passers-by on the street near them.

Nancy frowns. “I went to the inn this morning, but you weren’t there.”

“I thought you’d enjoy the day off,” Bonny replies, only frustrating Nancy more. “Although I know my visage is aggressively compelling, so I understand why you can’t stay away —”

“Are you trying to get rid of me?” Nancy demands.

Bonny baulks to reply, caught off-guard by the abruptness of the question. “You certainly don’t beat around the bush, do you?” she asks and sighs before answering, “No, of course not.”

“I don’t like liars, Lancaster,” Nancy hisses her name in a scornful voice. “It’s that Captain of yours. He doesn’t want you mingling with someone as beggarly as me, is that it?”

Nancy has met Captain Marius a scarce handful of times before. Usually, by the time she arrives at the inn to collect Bonny in the morning, her Captain is already gone.

If they happen to cross paths, their exchanges are always brief. The stares he gives her out of the corner of his eye are demeaning and he only ever deigns to acknowledge her presence with a nod, if even that, pounding a fist against the door to Bonny’s room at the inn until she bounds into the hall, her hair an untamed mess and frock coat buttoned wrong, chomping at the bit to begin the day’s events.

Bonny opens her mouth to argue but Nancy’s eyes cut through her in a frigid glare, and the navy woman’s mouth snaps shut again before she can convince Nancy she’s wrong by babbling some ridiculous twaddle about her Captain being set in his old ways and stoically defensive of his honour.

“He’s a zoilist,” Nancy scowls. “I’ve turned men like him into babies after one afternoon with my birch.”

Bonny grimaces at the instrument tucked under Nancy’s arm, gesturing to the street ahead of them. “Shall we walk? I’d very much like to banish that thought from my mind by whatever means necessary.”

As they walk together, Bonny hands Nancy the list in her hand detailing the visits they’re to make today. Nancy squints down at the page, shrewd blue eyes skimming the list.

“ _Tailor, milliner, haberdasher…_ ” she reads aloud. “Aren’t all of these the same thing?”

Bonny lets out an amused laugh. “Not quite. The crewmen need new shirts, buttons, hats…I’d like to visit the butcher’s sometime today as well to see if I can arrange a delivery of a few barrels of salted meat to Eddings. The Admiral’s galley is running low, and if the men aren’t fed soon, they’ll go feral.” She glances sideways at Nancy, noticing a slight unsteadiness in her gait every few steps. “Are you alright? You seem tired.”

“It’s the cold,” Nancy lies, handing the list back. Feigning tedium, she reaches out and runs her palm over the thick layers of frost sheeting the brickwork of the wall beside her, the rippling numbness that spreads through her fingers distracting her from the pangs of hunger in her stomach.

“Well, we’ll stop to eat before we do anything else,” Bonny insists, and Nancy grudgingly accepts that there’s no point in arguing. She can’t help but feel a twinge of guilt watching Bonny hand over a few coins to the first vendor she hunts down in the street, a woman selling meat pastries. It’s Nancy’s money, in a sense. Bonny is paying a hefty sum out of her pocket for Nancy to chaperone her around London.

 _It’s my time I’m wasting looking after her,_ she thinks, forcing herself to take the pastry Bonny passes her without complaint.

They sit down atop several crates stacked on the side of the street, shifting in silence while they eat. Nancy bites hesitantly at her meal, that is until Bonny is looking away, distracted by a passing sight or sound. Then, she takes large enough mouthfuls of her food she almost chokes, swiping flakes of pastry from her mouth with the back of a gloved hand.

After she swallows her last mouthful, Nancy realises something. “I’ve just remembered why I came to talk to you today in the first place.”

“Oh?” Bonny asks, half-listening as she chews her food.

“Did you have fun with the whore you fucked last night?”

Bonny coughs, gasps, and then _hacks_ , beating a fist against her chest to catch her breath. “ _What?_ ” she wheezes out, her eyes watering.

“One of the girls on my street was prattling on and on about the sailor she took to her bed last night. Didn’t think much of it — until she mentioned they had a swallow tattoo on their collarbone, just like yours,” Nancy smirks, gesturing to the tattoo of a swooping bird peeking over Bonny’s shirt collar. “Is it true you rode her like a racehorse?”

“That’s private information!” Bonny blurts, making Nancy laugh.

“Nothing stays private in this city for long. Was she any good?”

“She was _wonderful_ ,” Bonny retorts defensively.

“Well,” Nancy scoffs. “I’m glad you enjoyed yourself.”

Bonny hmphs, averting her eyes from Nancy’s with a furious blush across her face. She shoves herself off the crate, thrusting her list at Nancy’s smirking face.

“To the tailor’s, if you’d be so kind.”

“Of course,” Nancy agrees. Lifting herself off the crate, she tucks her birch under one arm and brushes the pastry flakes off her dress skirt, leading the way down the street. With an amused cackle, she calls out to Bonny over her shoulder, “Perhaps we’ll run into your jockey on the way!”

**~~O~~ **

Nancy waits, standing off to the side of the tailor’s shop while Bonny rattles off measurements from a page of her journal for the linen shirts she needs sewn to somebody at the counter. Although familiar with the street it resides on, the upper-class shop is far unlike any of the places Nancy visits in her own time.

She grimaces at the sickly crème paint over the walls, staring up at the enormous mahogany shelf towering above her head. The piece of furniture is stacked with dozens of rolled lengths of fabric, ranging in colours from pastel to dark.

Several other customers stop to gawk at her as they pass by, the hateful scowl she gives them only hastening their departure from the shop. Her presence must be a blight on the owner’s reputation, but he doesn’t breathe a word of complaint while Bonny is standing in front of him at the counter, bedecked in a navy man’s colours — although he can’t wrap his head around who on God’s Earth gave her _those_.

It isn’t until Bonny ducks away to a back room to take care of some business regarding her order that Nancy begins feeling uncomfortable. Left on her own, she lingers near the entrance of the shop rather than wandering any further inside where she can hear the local gentry nattering amongst themselves.

Her blood boils just looking at them, pompous fools powdered and dressed in the latest fashions strutting about the shop. She clenches her jaw, trying to ignore the mocking stares she feels burning into her back from other patrons. The smell of excess perfume in the air makes her head swim.

“Is that you, little Nancy?” Nancy’s heart leaps into her throat. She tightens her grip around her birch, her knuckles turning white. The stranger’s voice isn’t familiar, but she’s heard that same needling tone dripping with faux adoration so many times before during the years she had spent trapped in Golden Square.

There had been countless similar voices, all of them crooning with friendliness until the fee was paid and Quigley threw them in a room together where they could get at the flesh between her legs. After that, the once posh and respectable men unmasked themselves to reveal the true monsters beneath.

Their polite demeanours that had lured her as a child into thinking perhaps this cull would treat her kindly soured and turned cold, and their gentle touches leading her upstairs became cruel — the hands of men used to getting what they wanted leaving bruises where they gripped and slapped.

Quigley had normally reserved her for the rougher culls who didn’t care for a pretty face as long as they left Golden Square with their lust sated. The other girls had often told her she was lucky not needing to fool any of her culls with looks, wit, or clever wordplay, but Nancy never felt lucky when there was a fist in her hair pressing her face into a mattress.

“Men don’t care to look at you,” Quigley would say to her when she asked if she could wear a dress and await culls in the sitting room with Mags and the other girls, dressed in Greek fashions of flowing vestal white. “You’ve far too ugly of a face to win their favour with flaunts of beauty.”

Even now, her body tenses in anticipation of that constrictive grip around her arm, to be shoved, twisted, and bent into any position the cull liked.

“It is you!” the stranger declares. “I knew I recognised that face.”

A hand grasps Nancy’s shoulder and yanks her around, fingers taking a hold of her chin to tilt her head back so the stranger can marvel upon her face. Looking into the man’s eyes, her stomach churns, seizing as though she might vomit. Her birch arm trembles, the crevices of her palms clammy with cold sweat.

“How long has it been?” the man asks with a brazen grin. Nancy doesn’t recognise him, which she supposes is a blessing, but all of the faces from that period of her life blur together in her memory now. His coat is lined with a salmon pink trim, his hair hidden under a dark-brown wig. Behind him, a few other high-class men stand, glaring scornfully at Nancy with some bafflement at their companion’s interest in her.

“Oh, this one was a wildling,” he gloats to them. “She was my first girl at Quigley's when I visited in my youth. She used to bite and kick, but the mouth on her...now, that was pleasing in far more ways than one, and made all of the effort worthwhile.” He takes a step closer, groping her chest roughly with his other hand. “You should have seen Golden Square when it was at its prime, then — it was a magnificent venue. Velvet couches, silk curtains. I tell you, Lydia's pockets must have been laden with gold before her fall.”

 _You can strike him,_ Nancy tells herself. She’s filled with the urge to run but can’t, her arms immovable dead weight at her sides and her legs locked in place. _You’re stronger than you were before._

There’s nobody to scold her if she lashes out at him. Quigley can’t drag her by the wrist upstairs and lock her in a bedroom to sit alone in the dark, not from behind her jail bars. She can’t threaten to take Mags’ food away or starve any of the other girls. That had always been the point of the standoff when Nancy gave in, refusing to let the other girls suffer for her disobedience. She could take any cull Quigley gave her to. Her resolve has always been her strength.

_Hit him!_

But it’s Bonny’s fist that crashes into his face, throwing the man off-balance. He staggers backwards, cupping a palm under his chin to catch the blood that drips from his misshapen nose. After the initial crack and aftershock of knuckles impacting bone, Bonny stumbles back, nearly knocking into Nancy. Her eyes widen a fraction as the group of men advance on her, having forgotten to account for the “fighting back” aspect of their exchange.

Before she can reach for her sword, Nancy flings out a hand and grasps her arm. “Run!” she urges, pulling Bonny through the doorway.

They flee outside onto the cobbled streets, bolting into an alleyway with a pack of gentry at their heels. Nancy drags Bonny along by the sleeve, losing track of how many corners they turn and streets they zig-zag through. Thankfully, her innate sense of direction leads them where she’d hoped it would and they emerge onto a grey and dreary street, standing among throngs of peasant-folk where they are lost to their pursuers in a sea of faces.

“That was fun,” Bonny remarks sarcastically, panting where she’s doubled over with her hands on her knees. “I suppose I’ll have to find somewhere else to get those shirts now.”

“What were you thinking?” Nancy snaps. The exhaustion catching up to them from their escape hasn’t robbed her voice of any of its usual sting, and Bonny winces.

“I saw him making advances on you, and I…I could tell you wanted nothing to do with him. He thought you were a woman for hire, didn’t he?”

“Yes. That’s it.” Nancy nods, because of course that’s what Bonny thinks. She hadn’t heard the vile words that mongrel said to her, she had only seen a man whose station and birth-right soared above Nancy’s own gallivanting up to her and teasing her with touch and words. “But you shouldn’t have done what you did.”

“He put his hands on you. Far as I see it, he deserved worse.”

“How gallant,” Nancy mutters in a surly voice. “You’ll rot your teeth with all that sweetness coming out of your mouth. Stop coddling me, Lancaster. I can take care of myself.”

Bonny frowns. “I only meant —”

“I think I’ve had enough excitement for one day,” Nancy interrupts her. “There’s backs to flay, after all. If you don’t need anything else, I’ll take my leave.”

“Of course.” Bonny steps back awkwardly, catching herself before she trips over the gutter. “I can make my own way back to the inn. Here, your fee for today.” She drops several coins into Nancy’s hand. Looking around at the unfamiliar street they’re in, however, Bonny’s face betrays some confusion, causing Nancy to sigh.

“I’ll take you back,” she offers. “There’s someone I want to drop in to see anyway.”

**~~O~~ **

Margaret strokes the swollen mound of her stomach fondly with a hand. Nancy can almost picture Margaret’s third child bobbing around inside of her if she looks hard enough, but the thought puts her off her food, so she stares down at the cup in her hand, sipping slowly on the bitter brew drizzled with cloves and honey.

A fire crackles in the hearth nearby, Margaret sitting opposite her at the table as they take tea and indulge in one another’s company. The noise of custom in the Wells’ House is a distant burble from the bedrooms beyond the parlour, within which girls are taking culls, but both of them are used to such rutting noises and easily ignore the commotion.

“You look tired,” Margaret observes, looking at Nancy with concern. Curls of her dark-brown hair have escaped her bound style behind her head to fall down her shoulders.

“So everyone keeps saying,” Nancy sighs.

She is as grateful for the reprieve from the cold outside as Margaret is for the moment of peace away from her children, but their solitude doesn’t last long before the door creaks and Margaret’s youngest daughter Lucy pokes her head around the doorframe.

Nancy gestures her over. “Hello, sweetheart,” she coos, lifting the young girl onto her lap. Lucy giggles, toying with the gold ring hung around her neck. “Where’s your sister?”

Margaret groans, waving a hand dismissively. “I sent Charlotte off with Will. I thought a walk would do some good to settle her temper. I was at my wit’s end with her — she was up in arms with me about a doll she couldn’t find and thought I’d taken from her.”

“Ah. She’s a rambunctious girl.”

“She takes after her mother in that,” Margaret laughs softly under her breath, shaking her head. “Never mind us. What’s been happening with you?”

Nancy clears her throat. “I’ve recently found myself under the employ of a sailor.”

“A sailor?” Margaret repeats in disbelief. “You’re hanging around _sailors_ now?”

“Just the one, while she’s in London.”

“ _She?_ ” A cat-like smirk spreads across Margaret’s face. “Well, go on, tell me the rest! Don’t expect me to believe you came here just for my piss-poor brew of tea.”

Nancy can’t argue there, setting down her cup. “She vexes me to the point of agony. She’s far too hot-headed, constantly jumping from one thing to the next to keep herself occupied, and she’s never satisfied with anything for long, yet I find myself drawn to her company.”

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you sound enamoured by this woman,” Margaret teases, her eyes twinkling with mischief.

“It doesn’t matter,” Nancy sighs, shaking her head. “Any kind of relationship between us, I know it can’t happen. She’d be nothing but bad for me, and I for her.”

“So why don’t you cut yourself off from her now before you hurt yourself?”

Nancy can’t answer that. She leans back in her chair, rubbing her hands hopelessly over her face. “I don’t know. I can’t compete with the sort of partners she likes!”

“You act like you’ve got nothing to enchant this woman with,” Margaret points out. “Sometimes you need reminding you’re a woman full of mystery, Nancy Birch.”

“She doesn’t know what kind of hellish mess she’d be getting into with me.”

Margaret’s expression softens at Nancy’s despairing tone. She reaches out across the table to take Nancy’s hand, stroking a thumb over her knuckles. “You should be honest with this woman. Pour out everything you want to say to her and see how she reacts. You need to know if she’s worth your attention and that she feels the same way as you do. Stay there, I’ll bring you some warmer clothes before you go.” Untwining her fingers from Nancy’s, she rises from her seat to leave the table.

“You don’t have to —” Nancy begins to protest.

“ _Stay._ I won’t be long. Anything’s better than those threadbare rags you’re wearing that’ve kept together by some miracle,” Margaret interrupts her, making sure Nancy has sat down again before she departs the room.

Left alone with Lucy, Nancy broods to herself. “What do you think, then?” she asks the child on her knee. Lucy looks up at her, the colourful ribbons adorning her hair bobbing as she tilts her head. “Does the sailor have a boat?”

“I think so. Ain’t here, though,” Nancy answers.

“If you marry them, you’ll get the boat,” Lucy tells her. “Ma says a woman owns half of what a man does after she marries him, so you can keep half of the boat.”

“Wise words,” Nancy chuckles.

“I know. Can I tell you a secret?” Without waiting for an answer, Lucy scrabbles up Nancy’s chest, whispering guiltily into her ear, “I took Charlotte’s doll.”

Nancy cracks a grin. “You little minx. How’d you do that?”

“Don’t tell Ma or Pa. I stole it while Charlotte was sleeping,” Lucy admits with a pout. “She kept on saying hers was prettier than mine. I’ll put it back before she’s home, I promise.”

“See that you do. Poor girl must’ve been wailing an awful storm to rile your mother,” Nancy murmurs.

She leaves the Wells’ House with a stomach full of tea and a bundle of folded clothes under her arm. She has to hold her birch awkwardly to carry it, but she’s more than satisfied with the parting gift, knowing she’ll be lucky to have the clothes when the brunt of winter hits London. Already, the clouds above her head are darkening into the beginning of a storm.

Rain patters onto her hair and shoulders as she approaches the doors to the inn, stepping inside the establishment. Splotches of candlelight slather the walls in the front room, several lodgers drinking at tables or standing near the twisting flames of the fireplace to warm themselves. Bonny and her Captain are nowhere to be seen. Still in their rooms, Nancy assumes, taking the stairs to the next floor of the inn.

The wooden boards nailed haphazardly together to create the steep set of steps creak noisily under her boots. For a brief moment, she considers going back downstairs for a glass of gin to soothe her frazzled nerves, but she ignores the urge and presses on until she reaches the top of the stairs. Counting the number of closed doors along the upstairs corridor under her breath as she passes them, she comes up to the room she’s memorised as being the one Bonny is renting and knocks on the door.

“Come in!” Bonny calls out, and Nancy lets out the breath she’s been holding, relieved that she won’t be forced to have this conversation standing in a doorway. She pushes open the door, entering the room to find Bonny sitting at a writing desk, scribbling away into her journal.

She’s stripped herself of her navy frock coat, wearing a simpler white ruffled shirt with her belt and sword slung over the back of her chair. Her tricorne hat has been similarly discarded on the bed. She looks over her shoulder at Nancy, smiling. “This is a pleasant surprise. What brings you here?”

“I…” Nancy’s voice trails off. Fumbling for a response, she looks down at the articles of clothing in her arms and says without thinking, “I brought you some clothes. It’s a cold night, I thought you could make use of them.”

“For me?” Bonny asks. “Nancy, you’re too generous. Thank you. I will admit, I severely underestimated how freezing the weather in this city of yours would be.” She angles her elbow towards the window at the other side of the room, rain hammering the glass pane relentlessly now. “You should stay here until the rain eases off.”

“I suppose I will,” Nancy responds. Bonny doesn’t seem to be entirely listening, engrossed with the task at hand. The only sound in the room comes from the stick of charcoal in her hand scraping back and forth across the page in front of her, a candle perched next to her arm on the desk giving her the light to see.

“What are you working on?”

“Have you heard of the Longitude Act? There’s a series of rewards for whoever can create a method of accurately measuring longitude — that is, a ship’s east and west position on the sea — that can improve upon or best the methods already in practice.”

Nancy grimaces. “Not your stars again…”

“Exactly.” Bonny tosses aside her piece of charcoal, gesturing unenthusiastically to her diagram. Different lines arc across the page, labelled with numbers. “As you can see, my ideas so far have been spectacular failures. I thought I’d try my hand at a few theories, but no luck yet.”

“So you weren’t lying when you told me you could use the stars to navigate the sea?”

“Do you really think I’d make up such a complicated theory just to trick you? I’m not that cruel, or clever,” Bonny adds with laugh.

“Ah.” Nancy replies, embarrassed by her blunder of trust. “There’s something important I have to tell you.”

Bonny turns away from the desk, her voice light-hearted though a touch apprehensive. “What might that be?”

“A story that few get to hear.” Nancy sits down in the chair Bonny pulls up for her, laying her birch and the folded clothes under her arm at her feet, and waits until Bonny has lowered herself onto the side of the bed across the room to speak.

“I was kept captive in a bawdy house called Golden Square when I was twelve, held against my will. The other girls and I were raped every day and forced to pleasure as many of London’s gentry that came through the doors. The bitch who ran the house has been in jail for a few months now on a kidnapping charge, though I doubt she’ll stay there long with the friends in high places she has.”

Although she has rehearsed this speech a hundred times over in her head, the words don’t come easily off her tongue. A number of times, her voice shakes and she has to stop to recompose herself, but Bonny doesn’t interrupt. When Nancy finishes and lifts her gaze to meet Bonny’s eyes again, the other woman’s face is pale.

“God, Nancy, that’s horrific. I’m so sorry.”

“I don’t want your pity, Lancaster. I just thought you should know.”

“Gentry.” Bonny slowly puts the pieces together. “That man at the tailor’s shop today, he recognised you from your youth?”

Nancy nods. “I don’t remember him exactly. It’s impossible to say how many men…had me. Sometimes there was more than one man in the room with me at a time.” An involuntary laugh escapes her, but then she quietens at the sight of Bonny’s shocked expression. “I’m sorry, that was in bad taste.”

“Christ, Nancy. If I’d known, I never would have brought you to that shop. That can’t have been easy on you, reliving all of those memories.”

“Well, it’s all been said now.” Nancy clenches her hands into fists, steeling herself. “I’ll understand if you no longer want my services…”

“Hold on. What do you mean? Do you really think your past would make me feel _repulsed_ by you?” Bonny asks, sounding stung. “You were right today when you told me I shouldn’t concern myself with my Captain’s opinions of you, but you’re wrong about this.”

Nancy stares at Bonny, dumbstruck. “You don’t care?”

“That you were treated unforgivably as a child by those who should have protected you? No, Nancy, I don’t. What happened to you, it’s appalling. Anyone who’d shun you for enduring such disgusting abuse doesn’t deserve the courtesy of drawing breath around you.”

“But I’m —” _Tainted, ruined, ugly,_ Nancy thinks shamefully. Where had a man’s hands not been on her body?

“My friend,” Bonny finishes for her. “You’re my friend, Nancy. Nothing else matters to me.”

“Oh,” Nancy says, which is all she can manage to say.

“There’s something else. I’m leaving in three days,” Bonny confesses. She averts her gaze from Nancy’s, wringing her hands in her lap. “I shouldn’t have left it so late to tell you, but I was afraid of how you’d react.”

Still reeling, Nancy mumbles, “Oh.”

“I’d like to write to you, if that’s alright. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed our time together and I want to get to know you better.”

Nancy remains silent, mulling over thoughts and words. When she stands up, Bonny does too, worried she’ll bolt for the door.

“You’re welcome to hit me again. That’d make us even.” Her voice becomes a hint more panicked when Nancy steps towards her. “If I could provide counsel on the method, I’d prefer a punch, although a slap is much deserved —”

Nancy reaches up, cradling both sides of Bonny’s face with her hands. She presses her lips to hers, muffling Bonny’s exclamation of surprise, and feels her sway in giddy delight. She tastes like sunset. When she pulls back, she has to steady Bonny with a hand before she topples forwards over her own feet, savouring the other woman’s wide-eyed look of surprise with her hands framing the smooth curves of her face.

“I like you when you’re flustered,” Nancy smirks. “You’re much quieter.”

“I didthn’t know you were going to kisth me,” Bonny says, the warm glow from the candlestick in the room shimmering over her skin.

Nancy laughs, pinching Bonny’s cheeks between a forefinger and thumb. “I’ll write to you,” she agrees. “ If you promise to come and see me after your grand adventure.”

“As soon as I can.” Bonny promises. Nancy sees Bonny’s hands flinch, yearning to touch her, caress her face, or pull her closer, but she knows better than to reach for her. Nancy appreciates her restraint, uttering a soft but sad sigh of relief under her breath. “I’ll convince Marius into letting me visit. The old man has a soft spot for me, I’ll talk him around.”

“Alright.” Nancy nods. “Until then, I’m going to get myself a drink. Care to join me?”


End file.
